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Sunday, January 5, 2014

ZERO TO ZERO

MOVIE
REVIEW:

THE
LEGEND OF HERCULES

Review By:

G.P. Manalo

Directed By:

Renny Harlin

Starring:

Kellan
Lutz

Gaia Weiss

Scott Adkins

Hollywood
continues the trend of having two similar movies in one year (last year we had
two white house takeover movies). Later this year Hercules will be played by
Dwayne “The Franchise Saviour” Johnson in Hercules:
The Thracian Wars, but right now we have the Kellan Lutz version out in
theaters and this is pretty much an atrocious attempt at bringing the greek
hero to life. The film tries to be self-aware of how bad it is and be a dumb
action movie but instead feels like a blatant rip-off of Gladiator with action
scenes from 300.

THE LEGEND OF HERCULES tells the origin of the mythical Greek
hero, Hercules: In ancient greek, King Amphitryon has grown mad with power once
he had ruled a neighbouring kingdom, his wife is not fond with his behaviour.
She prayed to the Gods for deliverance, Hera appears to her and told her that
she will bear the son of Zeus. 20 years later, Hercules has become a man or royalty but a thorn in the side of his father. Because
of forbidden love between him and Hebe, a princess of Crete his father has exiled him to Egypt. Hercules,
has set out on a journey just to be ambushed, sold to slavery and take part as
a Gladiator. As he becomes a famed Gladiator, he fights to return to his
kingdom and overthrow his father, the king.

When I first heard that Hercules will have a Hollywood-ized
re-telling of his origin, I was both intrigued and feared. Intrigued because I
was raised by the Disney’s Hercules movie and I grew up wondering if that is
his true story or not (I soon realized it’s not because it is made by Disney)
and knowing that Hollywood is finally doing a movie about Hercules (twice in
one year), I could finally get that movie. But most of all I was in fear. In fear,
because when the trailer for this movie was released there was never one-line
spoken by the lead and there were gratuitous amounts of the 300 slow-mo action
effects, not to mention bad special effects and the other actors who had
speaking lines sounded like they have a forced British accents – I pretty much
summed up the flaws in this movie, did I?

But not only that really, the big flaw that
everybody is talking about is that it tries to be that “it’s so bad, it’s good”
type of movie, it tries to be self-aware that the movie is terrible and it won’t
try it’s best to even be a good movie but movie acts like everything it is
doing is meant to be taken seriously but it is really not. The movie is
directed by someone who had a history of making “it’s so bad, it’s good” type
of movies and it being Deep Blue See and Die Hard 2, but this kind of quality
is far from those. Like I said earlier the movie felt like a direct-to-dvd
rip-off of Gladiator, think of it this way a man who is associated with a
family of royalty and somehow gets screwed over, sold to slavery, becomes a
gladiator and now he will work his way up again to have his revenge….. Rings
any bells?!

The movie’s selling point is the action and the
special effects; the action of the movie was enjoyable for a little while.
Sure, there was an amazing scene from the trailer where they showed Hercules’
strength but that was halfway through the movie. The action scenes borrows the slow
motion effect sequence from 300 (where things will slow down and abruptly goes
back to normal speed), but the effect was over-used unnecessarily more than
once up to the point where the action becomes repetitive and dull to watch for
the most part. The special effects on the other hand do make the experience
worse. The movie is pretty much a green screen movie that looked like something from the Star Wars prequels and you can tell by most
of the shots in this movie, but the problem with the green screen effects is
that it looks unfinished in some scenes (you can tell by that opening shot of a
woman riding a horse or that lion in that gladiator-ish scene). For a $70 million dollar movies they make really shitty special effects.

The writing and the directing didn’t give
specific tones to the film resulting to the performances in this movie being bland
and lifeless, most of the actors either talk like modern-day people or people
sounding like they are gargling marbles for it to sound like a greek accent. I
can tell that some actors are trying but they ended up sounding like they were
growling their dialogue. Kellan Lutz does physically embody Hercules, but really
there is nothing more beyond that. There’s a perfectly good reason why he never
spoke one line in the trailers. The way he speaks his lines is like a bad Chris
Hemsworth Thor impression but with less charisma or personality and emotion. Gaia
Weiss spewing out romantic dialogue and looking like she is a reject actress
for a Porno. Scott Adkins sounded like he was doing a bad impression of
Leonidas as is his opposite, Roxanne McKee doing an even blander version of
Queen Gorgo.

In the end, The Legend of Hercules is a heavily
flawed movie to begin with. As I write this review and rack my brain for an
hour, I find it difficult to find something good about it. The film is selling
itself as a dumb action movie but in reality the film tries to be a serious
movie but you find yourself being distracted by the dumb and silly quality of
the overall film. The director has always made bad movies that are quite good
but this is just not one of them. I can't really recommend that you see this movie immediately in theaters, it's a safe watch for you when the movie is premiered in TV and you could probably enjoy it in that format. If Disney would write a song for this movie
it should be called “zero to zero” because... Hercules and…. That’s the quality
of the movie… I’ll get the fuck out now….